Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Governor Jerry Brown's 2014 State of the State Left Much Unsaid

I tuned in to California Governor Jerry
Brown’s State of the State speech a few minutes ago, and was disconcerted to
see Gavin Newsom slouching in front of the camera in the state Capitol,
babbling about interconnectedness and the need for technocratic, apolitical
solutions to human, political problems.
It seemed that he was doing the warm-up act for Jerry Brown.

Hackneyed phrases tumbled out of his mouth
with a vigour that suggested that if we could but harness the Lieutenant
Governor’s massive ego we could power the state—nay, the nation—without having
to burn so much as another particle of fossil fuel. The “tech genie” was now “out of the bottle”; we were rafting on the “white waters of change”; we were contemplating “organic job creation”; and we were quoting Winston Churchill…something about cows and tent poles.

His glistening mop aside, Newsom seemed
tepid. He is undoubtedly bored with his
job as number-two to a number-one who won’t return his phone calls in a system
of government that makes the lieutenant governorship nothing more than a
way-station.

Governor Jerry Brown, by contrast, was
bouncing on his feet when he took the podium, and lost no time in getting a
series of laughs at Newsom’s expense, slapping down the Lieutenant Governor
when he declared that “there is no substitute for experience”.

Brown launched into an ode to “California’s
comeback”, delighting in wonderment at “what a comeback it is”. He cited job growth, the budgetary surplus,
and minimum wage increases, without acknowledging that these gains are
temporary and based on comparatively anomalous moments of political contingency
that are unlikely to be replicated with anything resembling regularity.

Brown likes to see California’s ills as
chronic but manageable diseases rather than treatable problems. He cited a series of “long-term liabilities”
including pensions, retiree healthcare, roads and infrastructure, and future
risks related to the behaviour of the federal government and natural disasters. But he refuses to contemplate the kind of structural
adjustments to our political system that would empower legislators and, indeed,
the Governor himself, to actively manage these problems.

Brown gave significant credit for our
supposed “comeback” to California’s voters, praising their passage of Prop 25
(which ended the supermajority requirements for the budget, but not the
supermajority requirements for revenue increases) and Prop 30 as evidence of
our great wisdom.

Prop 25, Brown claimed, “ended the
gridlock”. It is in peddling this sort
of fiction that Brown is at his most dishonest.
As documented most thoroughly by Joe Mathews and Mark Paul in their
reform treatise California Crackup: How
Reform Broke the Golden State and How We can Fix It, California’s system of
government comprises a set of contradictory guidelines and strictures that even
Houdini couldn’t escape. So long as the
likes of Prop 13 goes unaddressed, and so long as we fail to recognize the
danger of a system of direct democracy which operates so dreadfully out of
synch with our formal political sphere, that gridlock goes totally unaddressed,
no less “ended”.

I’ve never been one to criticise Jerry
Brown for being old. But in the latter
part of the speech he began to go a bit loopy.
Perhaps he was just over-caffeinated. One of Gavin Newsom’s words was “hyper-connectivity”
or something along those lines. Newsom
is “hyper-annoying”. The California
Republican Party is “hyper-destructive”.
But Brown was just plain hyper. “Boom
and bust is our lot!” he thundered from the podium, quickly lunging to cite
Genesis, which was written down when Brown was but a wee lad.

It was when he beamed cheerfully that he
had playing cards for us that I knew he was having his Clint Eastwood
moment. Playing cards?! With his dog on them! I didn’t follow his logic (I think there
might have been a joke involved, but humour is not the Governor’s forte), but
began to wonder whether our state is being run by a corgi. Brown is a fan of the classics, so perhaps
instead of consulting pigeon entrails, he places bills before the corgi: “One bark
for yes, two or no, okay Sutter?”

The remainder of the speech was a blur
of disconnected thoughts which had none of the eloquence I associate with most
of Brown’s set-piece speeches. If there
was a thread tying them together it was Brown’s pet theory of Subsidiarity
which amounts to a declaration that problems are someone else’s
responsibility.

Brown claims to be promoting a drive for
the localisation of political power and responsibility, but each such measure
is off-set by a degree of centralisation.
The local control funding formula for schools is countermanded by the
embrace of Common Core. The transfer of
some prison responsibilities to local authorities is offset by the
sub-contracting by the state to corrupt prison companies which demand that the
state pay them even for empty prison cells.

“Life is local”, Brown declared, “and so
many of the things we try to do here in the state capitol” can only be handled
locally. And yet we face a drought which requires
centralised decision-making to safeguard and apportion our water resources and
ensure that this water is safe to drink and healthy for the habitats through
which it flows. How could we achieve Brown’s
ambition to drop gasoline consumption without central regulation?

Perhaps unsurprising given the manner in
which his austerity drive has contributed to the problem, Brown had virtually
nothing to say about economic equality.
Nor did he touch on the way in which well-funded schools and affordable universities
could contribute not just to a strengthening of the workforce and the creation
of jobs, but also the levelling of the playing field which is today dominated
by a comparatively small number of people to whom the wealth generated by our
state’s community has accrued. The omission
is curious given efforts to provide universal pre-kindergarten education and
the fact that the University of California Regents are meeting in San Francisco
to discuss the state of their beleaguered institution today.

Brown ended his speech calling for
vision, discipline, and the ability to persevere. But the speech was a chaotic grab-bag of
thoughts, mirroring our mangled polity.
It was surprisingly devoid of vision, showed little evidence of much
care or discipline, and gave little indication that this Governor has the
desire to tackle the social and economic problems which currently inhibit our
ability to endure and persevere as a healthy society.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.